Dozen
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A set of twelve.
"Can I have a dozen eggs, please?"
- 2 A member of a K-pop group who has no talent. derogatory
- 3 the cardinal number that is the sum of eleven and one wordnet
- 4 A large, unspecified number of, comfortably estimated in small multiples of twelve, thus generally implied to be significantly more than ten or twelve, but less than perhaps one or two hundred; many.
"There must have been dozens of examples just on the first page."
- 5 An old English measure of ore containing 12 hundredweight.
"The dozen as a measure for iron ore remained almost completely constant at 12 cwts. during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
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- 6 The number twelve.
- 1 being one more than eleven wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Each chapter in the textbook is followed by about a dozen comprehension questions."
Etymology
From Middle English dozen, dozein, doseyne, from Old French dozaine (“a group of twelve”) (Modern French douzaine), from doze (“twelve”) + -aine (“-ish”), from Latin duodecim (“twelve”) (from duo (“two”) + decem (“ten”)) + -ana (“-ish”).
From a deliberate misspelling of doesn't, originally referring to someone who "dozen sing, dozen rap, dozen do anything."
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.